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This D.C. Public School Lost Over 25% Of Its Teaching Staff In The Last Academic Year

The public school district of the nation’s capital is attempting to stem the figurative bleeding, which has resulted from a large increase in teachers leaving their positions at various schools.

According to the Washington Post, Ballou High School in Southeast Washington D.C. has lost over a quarter of its teachers since the academic school year began this past August. All of the teachers who are no longer employed at Ballou High School resigned from their positions since the dawn of the most recent school year.

Almost every last one of the recently vacated teaching positions at Ballou High were occupied by long-term substitute teachers, The Post reported. The teaching staff problems at Ballou High are apparently not isolated. Overall, the D.C. public school district has had almost 200 teaching positions vacated at various schools since August 2016.

Students who were in the classes of the long-term substitute teachers told The Post that their experiences in the classroom were far from enriching. In fact, one student told The Post that his experience was downright catatonic.

“No one is teaching. It’s been like that for months now,” said 16-year-old Dwight Harris, an 11th grader at Ballou High. “We don’t do anything, so I leave and go to my biology class or English class and go do other work,” Harris also said in his exclusive interview with The Post.

A teacher who quit her positon at the D.C. public school district complained about many things in her interview with the Washington Post. Rowan Langford, 22, is a former high school math teacher who told The Post that she quit her job this past January because she had trouble dealing with the behavior problems some of her students had.

“A lot of [students] felt really discouraged about math and used other methods to lash out. I couldn’t address those problems they were having on their own,” Langford told The Post. It is also worth noting that the majority of the schools where teaching positions were being vacated have large percentages of the student populations living in poverty.